The plot was focusing on the competition and it was about Kanade getting back her love for music. As opposed to the first season, where the main character was able to play violin because her instrument was magical, I preferred this one, where the main character was a violin prodigy to begin with. It felt like everything she achieved was through her own hard work and it made the story easier to relate to.
The art style was the same as from the previous seasons, which is good. It made the universe of the story coherent with the previous one. Some previous characters even made a small cameo appearance.
The music selection for the competition was classic, of course. I liked the arrangement they made to these pieces, notably Winter by Vivaldi and Danse Macabre. It made the performances enjoyable. Ave Maria has been played as well. I find that this piece was an important one in the first season and for it to be used again in the third season created a nice bridge to link them together.
The characters were somewhat annoying sometimes. I think their development occurred a little late. For a major part of the beginning, Kyouya just seemed to display a lot of misplaced anger without any clear explanation about it and it appeared redundant after a while. Kanade is shown as being naive and somewhat weak. I easily got nervous watching her, wondering if someone would say something that would make her hesitate again. Myoga Reiji's grudge against Kanade also seemed a little redundant. The nature of his grudge was easily predictable, but the whole back story could've been revealed a little bit earlier. We could see Kanade remembering fragments of it, but instead of repeating the same sequence for the entire serie and then throwing the rest at the end, it would probably have been better if they showed a little more each time as the story progressed.
Overall, this anime was fine, but it wasn't the best. The plot was too similar to the one from season one. The characters also made me cringe a few times. Still, if you liked season one, then you might like this spin-off as well.
